How do you convey the wide-open, magical world of fantasy stories such as The Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride and Harry Potter in an indoor, cave-like museum space? Such was the puzzle EMP faced when planning its new long-term exhibit, Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic, which showcases pop culture artifacts (costumes, models,…

MUST WALKEarth Day 5KSaturday (4/20) — Seattle magazine’s first ever 5k run/walk follows a gorgeous route that wends through the Olympic Sculpture Park and skirts Elliott Bay along the Myrtle Edwards Park bike trail. A portion of each registration goes to the Green Seattle Partnership, a nonprofit working to restore our urban forests and parks….

The latest music video from Seattle hip hop sensations Macklemore and Ryan Lewis is out. Call of the Wild, intercepted by James Bond, meets The Goonies and an obligatory rooftop party. It’s as fun as it is totally insane. Also, the mystery of the black American flag spotted on the Space Needle is solved.  

As the Mariners ramp up their annual campaign, the best and the worst of Seattle baseball will come together at Safeco Field this season. Longtime fans are already well acquainted with what the worst feels like: If you endured the wretched Mariners teams in the 1970s and ’80s, you remember two decades of joyless seasons…

Living in a port city means getting so used to seeing stacks of shipping containers that we hardly see them at all. But that’s not the case for Seattle artist Mary Iverson (maryiverson.com), a graduate of both UW and Cornish College, whose work brings the colorful metal boxes to the foreground. In her hands, the…

MUST WATCHKafka’s The TrialOngoing (4/5–4/28) — New Century Theatre Company is staging an appropriately claustrophobic new take on Kafka’s classic, The Trial, housed (also appropriately) in Seattle’s former INS building. Audience members are categorized and “processed” as they enter, and sit in a “jury box” to watch the unsettling proceedings. Starring veteran Seattle actors Darragh…

As Swan Lake prepares for takeoff at Pacific Northwest Ballet (4/12-4/21), the company is posting some rehearsal videos that are pretty irresistible—in large part because they offer a peek at backstage ballet fashion, which never fails to mesmerize. How do the dancers end up wearing such a colorful mishmash of leotards, tights, heat wraps, flouncy…

There will be much ado, indeed, at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) this year. The festival opens with Joss Whedon’s take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, starring Alexis Denisof, Amy Acker, Nathan Fillion, and Clark Gregg. The film was shot in twelve days, uses the original text and apparently was edited on a laptop…

[View the story “What Knute’s Reading: April 8, 2013” on Storify]  

When my husband and I first bought our home, we felt somewhat banished in pre-cool Ballard. (This was 2001, and the sleepy Scandinavian burg was the most affordable neighborhood closest to Lower Queen Anne, where we’d been happily living in an apartment.) But then we stumbled upon Ballard Market and discovered that the humble-appearing grocery…

MUST SEEMaster Harold…and the boysOngoing (thru 4/21) — Apartheid, class issues and ballroom dancing blend in South African playwright Athol Fugard’s acclaimed Broadway drama. Longtime local theater fans will be thrilled to learn that this contemporary take is directed by Burke Walker, founding artistic director of the dearly departed Empty Space Theatre, and stars another…

Franz Kafka was a master at crafting absurd yet convincing scenarios (perhaps most famously in his man-turns-cockroach story, The Metamorphosis) and capturing the particularly human feeling of existential dread. You might have experienced a similarly surreal sense of displacement if you ever had the misfortune of being an immigrant detained for days or weeks at…